Bill Caraher blogging at The New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World yesterday posted a link to a demo of a new iPad app for trench side data collection at PKAP. Actually he originally linked to this page on April 20 but yesterday he gave a little more information. This seems to be a custom app written by Sam Fee from Washington and Jefferson College.

Bill is more heavily invested in linking social media to his field project than most people I know and the description of his use of iPads reflects that.

This summer, we’ll extend our social and new media reach into the field. Messiah College – one of our three co-sponsoring institutions – will provide the project with iPads for the students to use in the field, the museum, and the hotel. They should be able to publish photographs, video, and reflections directly from the field.

So the iPads are to be used to document more than just the archaeology but their use will expand to allow the students to be able to record and upload their own thoughts during the project.

There are several people that I know who are writing custom apps for their field projects. Most of them are in testing stages and there is very little that I know about how they are accepted by the teams and how the data collected is integrated into the larger data workflow. But the best part about Bill’s approach to archaeology is that I won’t have to wait long to hear about it.

Noel Hidalgo Tan from the Australian National University has recently presented a paper at the Australian Archaeological Association on his use of tablets to record the location and motif details of rock art in Thailand. He uses the full range of the hardware including the camera, GPS, and audio recordings for lengthy descriptions. He has blogged about the paper and has uploaded the slides from his presentation.

He uses slightly different software than we do at Pompeii, and I will have to check out Tap Forms, his preferred database app.